


Two to One

by Subjuggul8ion



Series: Guro 33 [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: BioWare, Body Horror, Conjoined Bodies, Helmsman Sollux Captor, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 15:37:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/967663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Subjuggul8ion/pseuds/Subjuggul8ion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was a game they played, a game for the eons, as she kept life coursing through his veins, kept pesky memories away and wrote her essence into every fiber of his being.</p><p>Until that one day he stopped responding.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two to One

**Author's Note:**

> The second in a series of guro challenge prompts, originally posted to Tumblr.

Innumerable sweeps pass after the Empress forbids adult life on their home planet. Thousands and thousands of sweeps take the imperial fleet galaxies away, and still her Helmsman stays true, their red and black vacillations always causing her to leave his chamber with more of a spring in her step and a reward of either a surge to the engines or an unexpected change in course to keep her and her navigators on their toes. It was a game they played, a game for the eons, as she kept life coursing through his veins, kept pesky memories away and wrote her essence into every fiber of his being.

Until that one day he stopped responding.

He was still alive, and his mind was still functioning well enough to respond to inputted commands, could respond and spark and be the ship, but could be HER Helmsman no more. It was as though his higher mental faculties had simply been deleted, wiped clean from the system to leave him a shell of a troll and nothing more than a powerful battery.

Once emotions she hadn’t expected had been given the chance to run their course, a decision had to be made. All systems were a go, he was still completely functional on a purely technical basis, but after so long of playing games with his sentient mind, she knew she would grow to miss an engine who would play games with her, she knew she would grow to miss a Helmsman who could keep her on her toes, who could match wits with her and outwit some of her more intelligent programmers.

She knew she would have to go all the way back to Alternia.

She knew that, by now, he simply must have a descendant to continue his games.

The journey back was a long one, but a direct one. The sweeps stretched on uneventfully, but as they drew ever closer, The Empress found herself thinking back more and more – and, eventually, looking forward to what was to come, to finding the boy and doing a thing that simply wasn’t done.

But who was anyone to tell her what was and was not done?

If his psiioniics were any match for his ancestor’s, then she would have the fastest, most powerful ship that history had ever heard of – she already had the best ship in the Imperial fleet, after all – and if he was anything like his ancestor in personality, then she would once again have her games to play.

And maybe the second presence would wake Her Helmsman from whatever state she had found him in, from whatever state he persisted to be in.

Alternian skies hadn’t seen an Imperial ship in a very long time, and she couldn’t help but wonder what the reaction would be to seeing the red mass floating, scanning, seeming to be looking for something, someone.

Someone who was found easily enough, wasting away in front of a husktop in a communal hivestem. If it wasn’t for the long string of messages on the screen, it could almost be assumed that he wouldn’t even be noticed missing, let alone missed. Not that it mattered either way when the attack drones broke his door down and dragged the surely shocked adolescent back to the ship, psiioniics be damned. Dragged him from his hive, from the building, onto the ship, and straight back to the waiting empress in the waiting engineblock.

His fate hadn’t seemed to register in him yet, confusion reading predominantly on his features rather than fear, but as her smile grew, so too did his understanding of his plight. It was just this side of adorable, and only served to make her fins twitch in mild amusement as formal greetings were offered even as the wetware began to coil around his ankles, began to work its way up and over his body gently, too gently, only plucking at, shredding clothing and casting scraps aside (he wouldn’t be needing those anymore, after all, and he hadn’t exactly been fitted for an adequate adapter suit yet, so this would just have to do).  
The process had been programmed to be slow, this time, to let her watch the integration completely, watch realization bleed into fear into struggling, sparking being absorbed already to power the ship as the defensive psiioniic discharge only served to attract the tendrils of bioware to him, tendrils which wrapped him in their too-tight hold to bring him to the back of the troll he once believed to be dead, strung up in the middle of the room, stretched his body out to be a mockery of the older troll’s as hands and legs were wired into the machinery first.

Small pinpricks at hands and feet turned into stabbing sucking pain as the wetware worked its way from extremities to core, wound him deeper into its embrace with a relentless persistence that didn’t even give him time to process what was happening, let alone scream. He was half-enveloped before the hour was up, and then was the time when tendrils began to branch and grow from those already inside of the once-troll to his back, sink into his flesh as easily as the others had done and pull him closer by simply coiling tangling integrating with his spinal column as a whole.

It left neither of them exposed, and the living machine seemed to have a realization of its own. As it integrated this new psiioniic with the system, so too could it integrate it with the old, and with a quickness that did not match the routine installation, with the quickness that served to highlight that the machine, too, could think and adapt, it began to bind two into one, began to break down barriers of tissue and bone, began to intertwine one spinal column to another in the simple pursuit of making its job more efficient.  
And still the new Helmsman, the young Helmsman, the one who had been the Heiress’s matesprit who had been best friends with the mutant’s descendant who had been-

Had been- had been- H-H-Ha-a-a-a-d be-e-e-n- )(a-a-d B---E---EN---

)(AD B-E-E-E-E-E-E------

“Installation of Helmsman unit 20022026922 complete.

“All glory to the Empire. Long life be to )(er Imperious Condescension.”


End file.
